The present invention relates generally to cooling systems for vehicle subsystems and more particularly to a waste heat accumulator/distributor system incorporated into vehicle cooling systems.
Traditionally, vehicles employing internal combustion engines and automatic transmissions have separate cooling systems for the two vehicle subsystems. In the case of hybrid electric and extended range electric vehicles, often a third separate cooling system for the powertrain electronics is also employed. These separate cooling systems take up a significant amount of packaging space and add weight with no benefit of synergies since the three cooling systems are separate.